Seattle Cleans Up Garbage Trucks: DOCs and Biodiesel to Cut Emissions

25 August 2005

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels announced that the city’s garbage and recycling trucks are upgrading their exhaust systems and switching to a B20 biodiesel/ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) blend fuel in an on-going effort to reduce emissions.

Seattle’s solid waste fleet, contracted through Rabanco and Waste Management, totals 180 recycling and garbage trucks. During the next six months these diesel trucks will be retrofitted with diesel oxidation catalysts (DOCs) to reduce toxic tailpipe emissions.

When combined with ultra-low sulfur diesel, emissions of fine particulates and toxic air pollutants are reduced by as much as 90%.

In addition, half the fleet will begin using a B20 (20% biodiesel) blend, funded by Seattle City Light (the city electric utility) as part of its program to mitigate its greenhouse gas emissions.

Nickels was the organizer of the bipartisan US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement coalition, which is working to achieve what would have been the Kyoto Protocol’s US target for reductions in greenhouse gases (7%) in the member communities. (Earlier post.)

» Seattle Garbage Trucks To Spew Less Garbage Into Air from Treehugger
Seattle is on the move! Already a leader in recycling, soon to start recycling/composting food waste on a large scale (we wrote about this here), the city is now cleaning up its garbage truck fleet. Mayor Greg Nickels has announced... [Read More]

Tracked on September 13, 2005 at 06:44 AM

» Seattle Garbage Trucks To Spew Less Garbage Into Air from Treehugger
Seattle is on the move! Already a leader in recycling, soon to start recycling/composting food waste on a large scale (we wrote about this here), the city is now cleaning up its garbage truck fleet. Mayor Greg Nickels has announced... [Read More]

Tracked on September 16, 2005 at 04:06 PM

Comments

"When combined with ultra-low sulfur diesel, emissions of fine particulates and toxic air pollutants are reduced by as much as 90%."

Impressive! This should be done to all heavy diesel trucks that don't already have that tech + biodiesel.

We’ ve gone as green as possible in the office by printing out only files we need to have hard copies of, we encourage other wedding professionals to send‘ brouchures’ online (as they’ re conserving paper, we can keep more up- to- date information and they take up less file space), we recycle our ink cartridges, and magazines and we’ re working on a new project to shred all our paper waste and compost it with our lawn clippings.